Weekly Readings Newsletter

An excerpt from John Main OSB, “Healthiness of Spirit” in FULLY ALIVE, MEDITATIO Talk Series 2011-D, Oct-Dec (London: WCCM, 2011), pp. 9-10.

A big problem that all of us have to face is deciding what is really important in our lives and what is trivial, to learn to differentiate between what is passing away and what is enduring. The English medieval writer John of Salisbury wrote:

It’s not possible for one who, with her whole heart, seeks after truth, to cultivate what is merely empty.

Lent is a time when we refine and purify the spiritual senses and identify the habits or patterns that pollute them. The means of doing this are the exercises we undertake in this season. It is not a time for self-punishment or repression.

From John Main, OSB, “God’s Two Silences,” THE WAY OF UNKNOWING (New York: Crossroad, 1990), pp. 6-8.

We live in a very unsilent world. We live in a world that is so full of bombarding foreground and background noise that we hear everything at once and listen to nothing. And yet each one of us is called into the state of prayer, of pure attention, of expansion of spirit in the eternal silence of God.

When he tells us not to worry, Jesus is not denying the reality of daily problems. It is anxiety he is telling us to abandon, not reality. Learning not to worry is hard work. . . .[Yet] despite its “attention-deficiency disorder,” even the modern mind has its natural capacity to be still and to transcend its fixations.

An excerpt from John Main OSB, “Death and Resurrection,” MOMENT OF CHRIST (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 68-70.

The whole Christian tradition tells us . . .that if we would become wise we must learn the lesson that we have here “no abiding city”. . .But the principal fantasy of much worldliness operates out of completely the opposite point of view. . . The wisdom of our tradition… .is that awareness of our physical weakness enables us to see our own spiritual fragility too.

Meditation is the prayer of faith because we are willing to follow the Teacher’s command: we are willing to lose our lives so that we may realize fully our potential.And when we have found our true Self, our task is only beginning.

The Desert Fathers, who had read and understood the Gospel, also understood how it is always relationship that is healing. Solitude taught them that and sustained them in the life of their communities. They knew that relationship grows through listening. They also knew what demons were. . . .

From John Main OSB, "The Oceans of God" (December 1982), THE PRESENT CHRIST(New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 111-112, 116-117.

Our life is a unity because it is centered in the mystery of God. But to know that unity we have to see beyond ourselves and with a perspective greater than we generally see with, when self-interest is our dominant concern. Only when we have begun to turn from self-interest and self-consciousness does this larger perspective begin to open.

An excerpt from John Main OSB from THE BURNING HEART: Reading the New Testament with John Main, ed by Gregory Ryan (London: Darton, Longman + Todd, 1996), pp. 42-43.

For the same God who said, “Out of darkness let light shine,” has caused his light to shine within us, to give the light of revelation—the revelation of the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:6)

Christ is light. He is the light that gives range and depth to our vision. He is also, in his fully realized consciousness, the eyes with which we see the Father in the divine perspective.

Without his light our vision would be tied to the partial dimension and our spirit could not soar above itself into the infinite liberty and crystal clarity of the unified state. Our consciousness would, however wonderful, remain an observer on the periphery, . . .unfulfilled by union with his consciousness, uncoordinated with his Body. . . ...

The mantra . . .is recited continuously whatever we may be feeling: “in times of war and times of peace,” as The Cloud of Unknowing puts it; “in times of prosperity and adversity,” as John Cassian puts it; “from the beginning to the end of each meditation,” as John Main said in his turn.